


headin' into twilight (spreadin' out her wings tonight)

by skitzofreak



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, American military, F/A-18F, F/M, Mig-29, Rated for swearing, Top Gun AU, Tumblr Prompt, and flirting, and reflections on hair, fighter pilot stuff, happy stuff, just flying, no betas we find typos like men, no politics though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-03
Updated: 2017-10-03
Packaged: 2019-01-08 17:35:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,542
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12258939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skitzofreak/pseuds/skitzofreak
Summary: Up there with the best of the best.





	headin' into twilight (spreadin' out her wings tonight)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jenniferjun1per](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jenniferjun1per/gifts).



“Bogey, left, ten degrees high, three miles,” Bodhi’s voice crackled in her ear.

Jyn scanned the grey skies, but she couldn’t get a visual yet. “Blind,” she called. “Is he hostile?”

“Can’t get a good lock on him,” Bodhi muttered from the cockpit behind her. “No good IFF. You’ll have to get a visual confirmation before you can fire.”

“Going high,” she replied, pulling back the stick and throttling up.

“No, wait, Jyn, don’t!” Bodhi squawked. “We’re supposed to stay low in the trees!”

“The ground clutter’s interfering with the radar,” Jyn bit back. “Just keep an eye on that contact.”

“Right, shit, left, five degrees low, two miles, closing fast.”

“Blind,” Jyn repeated, glaring at the nearest cloud bank (fucking cloud decks, it was always harder to pick out grey-painted bogeys against a grey sky) and putting in a five degree turn. _Always point your nose at the enemy_ , her first commander had drilled into her. _Even when you can’t see them_.

Bodhi’s normally cool voice took on a brittle edge. “One mile, ten degrees low. You’re flashing our belly at him!”

A flash of dark grey against light grey, and Jyn’s mouth stretched into a sharp-edged grin. She recognized the distinct silhouette immediately. “Contact! Fulcrum, Fulcrum, Fulcrum!” She all but shouted the codename for the MiG-29. “Bogey is designated Bandit. Gun’s hot, left to left pass!” She flicked the master switch of the forward-mounted cannon into firing position and pushed the nose over.

“Confirmed Bandit,” Bodhi echoed, because the flights were recorded and they were required to audibly agree whenever firing on an enemy.

Unfortunately, the enemy must have caught sight of them at the same, because he pulled up hard, angling for her underside so that he could get into firing position before she could. He must have thrown on power to the throttle, too, because he shot underneath her much faster than she’d anticipated and banked hard to get behind her.

“Break left, break left!” Bodhi shouted, and Jyn could see her gunner’s reflection in her mirrors, bracing his hands on the cockpit canopy to turn and stare back at the Fulcrum that was now rising into their unprotected rear target zone. “He’s closing angles!”

 _The hell he is_ , Jyn thought fiercely, although all she had time to say was “ _brace!”_ as she threw the jet into a hard wing over, rolling upside down and forcing the nose into an almost immediate dive. The maneuver plunged her down towards the hard, unforgiving ground, and behind her Bodhi started counting off the altitude left before impact in a breathless voice. “Ten thousand feet…nine thousand…eight thousand. He’s closing angles, three seconds until he’s got a shot! Six thousand… _five thousand feet!”_

Jyn wrenched the nose upwards again and threw full power on the throttle. The engines whined and the g-force indicator shot up – six G’s and climbing. Her limbs, suddenly six times heavier than normal, shook slightly as she struggled to keep them on the controls. She sucked in air and tightened all the muscles in her lower body to force the blood back up into her head to stop herself from passing out. Her vision greyed slightly around the edges. Behind her, Bodhi was still calling altitude even as he struggled to keep his breathing steady. “ _Three thousand...Two thousand to the deck!”_

Finally, the nose climbed above the horizon, the jet finished scooping, and they started to climb again. Jyn grinned madly as the heavy pull of gravity lifted, and she was for just a moment, weightless and flying and free.

“Three thousand feet and climbing,” Bodhi called with palpable relief. “Bandit is across-circle, five degrees high.”

“I’ve got him,” Jyn replied, thumbing the gun trigger. “Weapons hot.”

“Weapons hot,” Bodhi echoed again. He tapped at his screen and Jyn’s console lit up with targeting information. “Bandit locked. Your target.”

“My target,” Jyn confirmed, and grinned. “Trigger down.”

The gun made a high-pitched noise, a thin echo of the stuttering roar it made when it was actually loaded with twenty millimeter bullets.

“Missed high,” a new voice crackled calmly over the radio, and it was hypocritical of Jyn to think of it as ‘prissy’ when it was essentially the same accent as her own. She did it anyway. “Recommend another pass.”

“The hell we missed,” Jyn snarled, though she kept that comment in-cockpit. She’d been reprimanded one too many times for swearing over the radio. Behind her, Bodhi sighed, then keyed the mic.

“Sorry, sir, Rebel Five is bingo on fuel and will RTB. Thanks for the exercise.”

“Understood,” a second voice replied, also accented but not, as far as Jyn was concerned, prissy at all. “See you back at base, Rebel Five.”

“See you, Spy Two,” Jyn replied as dismissively as possible. _The hell I missed_ , she thought again, but then Bodhi was calling for their post-dogfight checklist and she had to get her head back in the game.

“We’ll check the tapes, Jyn, don’t worry,” Bodhi tried to reassure her. “They’ll show that you were centered right on him when you fired.”

“’Course,” Jyn grumbled. “Master switch is off. Gun’s cold.”

“Copy, gun’s cold. We’ve got just enough fuel to punch it back to base, if you want to at least get on the ground before Spy Two does.”

“We’re faster than that crappy MiG anyway,” Jyn replied. Still, she throttled forward and set course for the shortest route back to the runway. It was bad enough when the two professional red air pilots beat her in a training dogfight. It was worse when she crawled out of the cockpit, sweaty and smelling of jet fuel, to find the both of them already out of their gear, hair combed, and casually lounging in the ready room like they were ready for a photoshoot with a fashion magazine.

Tuesso was obnoxious enough even when he _wasn’t_ cleaner and prettier than her. And Andor…well, there was a reason his callsign was “GQ.”

 

\--

 

“Hey, Bruiser, Twitchy, heard Spy Two was in the range at the same time as you guys,” Solo called cheerfully as they stomped into the locker room to hang up their gear. Jyn rolled her eyes at Bodhi and went to her hook, shimmying out of her heavy survival vest and harness and hanging her helmet up. She’d never minded her callsign, but she’d been a bit irritated that somehow ‘Twitchy’ had stuck for Bodhi. He was doing so much better these days, and the callsign was a leftover from flight school, years ago.

Her partner didn’t react to it, though, simply smiled at Solo and replied, “Yeah, we ran into them. I guess they were training for that big Red Air exercise next month, ‘cause they were in the MiG.”

“Did you shoot ‘em out of the sky?” Solo leaned against the wall and shot finger guns at Jyn. “Pew pew, visual kill?”

“Yes,” Jyn said, at the same time Bodhi shrugged, “maybe.”

“Um,” her partner hedged when Jyn glared at him. “I mean, sure. Probably.”

“On the contrary,” the prissy voice replied from the door, and Jyn groaned. “Their nose was three degrees too high for a probable kill. Likely the worst damage would have been some holes in our vertical stabilizer.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jyn turned and glowered at the incoming team. The tall one in front, prissy Kay “Robot” Tuesso, glowered back, his helmet under his arm. Behind him, the slightly shorter, darker pilot edged into the locker room.

“We’ll check tapes,” he said quietly, giving Jyn a brief smile that made her feel like a heel for being so touchy. Cassian “GQ” Andor was, generally, a pretty likable guy. It made Jyn antsy in ways she could not exactly describe, and would punch anyone who asked her to try. “It was very close,” Andor said peaceably. “A good pass.”

“She exposed her belly to us,” Kay began, “It was a reckless-”

“We picked you up on radar at three miles,” Bodhi interrupted, clearly trying to defend his pilot. “We could have just shot you then. I mean, not in training, but in a real world scenario we would have support assets to identify you from a distance.”

“Unless we were hiding down in the tree line-“

“Well, _we_ were in the tree line, too, so-“

“We’ll check tapes,” Jyn snapped, cutting off the argument. “Thanks,” she mouthed at Bodhi once Kay had looked away.

“Well, sounds like you all had a party, anyway,” Solo shrugged, clearly bored by the debate. “Sorry Chewie and I missed it. Have fun debriefing it for ten solid hours,” he flicked his hand dismissively and strolled out. He wasn’t entirely wrong, Jyn thought. Spy Two had a reputation for being ridiculously thorough in their debriefs. Especially for new pilots just joining the program. At one point, some of the other (asshole) instructors in the squadron had started awarding “Andor-istan” awards to the new guys who “survived” Spy Two’s longer, more painfully meticulous debriefs. Jyn herself had never really minded the long hours going over every second of their flights together, close in the small briefing spaces with Andor usually sitting close to her side. Tuesso usually preferred to stand or slump against the wall, watching the tapes with a critical eye, calculating angles and speed ratios on the whiteboards and critiquing every tiny decision. Bodhi typically across from her with that peaceful, intent look he got when he was absorbed in his work. It was one of the few times out of the cockpit that he looked happy, really.

It was one of the few times out of the cockpit that Jyn _felt_ happy.

But that was neither here nor there.

“It was a risky move,” Andor said cautiously, moving to stand next to Jyn and shucking his own gear. He watched her from the corner of his eye as he unhooked the harness clips, clearly worried that he was going to offend her. His hair, she was pleased to note, was even messier than hers. She almost never got to see him like that, and it was…well, alright, she kind of liked it. She kind of liked it a lot. Sometimes she even caught herself wondering if it was ever that messy at other times besides when he’d just pulled off his helmet. Did he wake up with hair like that?

Not that she was wondering what he looked like when he woke up.

Shit.

Jyn shrugged at him, then slammed her gear onto the hook and raked her hands through her own horrifically messy hair, yanking at the tie and trying to get it into some kind of professional knot.

“It’s Friday,” she announced. “Someone tell me the drinking light is on.”

“It is,” Andor smiled at her, and for some reason his eyes flicked back to her hair as she tugged at it. Then he seemed to jerk his head away, and studiously stared at his G-suit as he stripped it off, leaving him in just his flightsuit. “Spy One just landed, so the duty officer flipped it on.” He glances up and the smile edged back onto his face. “Buy you a drink?”

“The ready room bar is paid for by officer’s dues,” Tuesso said huffily. “That means the drinks are free,” he elaborated when both Jyn and Andor turned to frown at him.

“It was a joke, Kay,” Andor said mildly.

Jyn rolled her eyes.

“Well, I’m in favor of debriefing over a beer,” Bodhi said, scrubbing at the lines his oxygen mask had carved on his cheeks. “I’ll queue up the tapes, you get the drinks?”

“Yeah, Briefing Room three,” Jyn told him, and stretched her arms over her head, delighting in the lightweight feeling of being in only her flightsuit and boots after hours of lugging about fifty pounds of heavy gear. “It’s got the biggest screen. So we can see, in detail, the _exact moment_ I bullseyed the target.” She turned and stared directly at Andor, eyebrow raised in challenge.

He smiled again. “Of course.”

“Yes, a large screen would be optimal,” Tuesso agreed, and followed Bodhi across the room. “I’ll help you find the correct timestamp and queue up our own tapes as counterpoint.”

“Oh good,” Bodhi muttered. And then the door swung shut behind him and Tuesso, and it was just Jyn and Andor in the suddenly quiet locker room.

“I know it was risky,” Jyn said into the awkward silence. She frowned and looked down at her boots. “But it wasn’t entirely uncalculated. If I could pick you out of the clouds before you saw me, I could have rolled in right behind you before you had a chance to react.”

He nodded, then said a little hesitantly. “If.”

Jyn sighed. “Yeah, well. I still won.”

His lips pressed together, but it looked more like humor than irritation. “Of course,” he said again, and then he reached into his locker and pulled out…

“Seriously?” Jyn couldn’t help the little laugh, and Andor glanced at her, the comb halfway to his hair.

“What?”

“Nothing, _GQ_ ,” she snarked, crossing her arms and leaning back against the lockers, watching him.

“Not everyone can pull off the bedhead look so well, _Bruiser_ ,” he replied dryly, shoving the comb through his hair and deliberately not looking at her.

Jyn jumped a little, then eyed him carefully. Had that been…flirty? Was Andor flirting with her? Because it definitely sounded flirty.

“Bedhead?” She asked, trying desperately to sound completely casual.

He froze, just for a moment, and Jyn saw his eyes widen as if he’s just realized what he’d said. Then he shrugged, a little too stiffly to be entirely nonchalant. “Hey, I have to work hard to look this good,” he joked, still not looking at her.

Jyn bit her lip, debating with herself. _Oh, to hell with it_. “Not really.”

He turned and looked at her, the comb forgotten in his lowered hand. Jyn stared back and tried not to shift her weight uneasily.

“Should we get those drinks?” he said at last, and Jyn exhaled.

“Yeah,” she pushed up from the locker and jerked her head towards the door. “Let’s go. They’ve probably got the tapes up and ready by now.”

“Right. And, uh, Jyn?”

She stopped, one hand on the door, looking back over her shoulder at him. “What?”

“After the debrief,” he seemed to be struggling for the words, rolling the comb between his fingers absently.

Jyn turned back and looked at him, tilting her head and waiting. Her heart was suddenly pounding, her limbs felt heavy – it was like being under G-forces again, she thought. Pulling hard from a dive and hoping she made it before she smashed herself against the hard ground.

“Maybe I can still buy you that drink,” he said slowly. “At a real bar.” He met her eyes squarely and seemed to gather himself together. “If you like.”

And then the pull faded, she was climbing back into the sky again, weightless and flying and free. “Yeah,” she grinned at him. “Yeah, I would.”

No, she decided as his face broke into an almost stupidly beautiful smile. He really didn’t have to work that hard at all.

 

**Author's Note:**

> YES the title is from "Highway to the Danger Zone" because of course it is.
> 
> So I tried to make this as civilian friendly as possible, but probably failed. Sorry. Some quick notes: “Fulcrum” is officially the [NATO reporting name](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_reporting_name) for the MiG-29, an aircraft that is traditionally used as ‘Red Air’ (‘enemy’) in American Air Force/Navy training. 
> 
> The ‘drinking light’ is a proud tradition in Navy squadrons (and I think USAF, but who knows with those weirdos) where once the highest ranking pilot (the commander, usually) lands on the last day of the workweek, the light gets flipped on and you’re allowed to pull a beer or two from the communal fridge (or bar, if your squadron pools their money together and buys something nice. For the record, the taxpayer does NOT in any way contribute to the bar/fridge/beer supply, it’s all bought out of pocket by the officers, and of course you don’t have anything like it when deployed. Only at home, during training.)
> 
> Also, just in case anyone's confused: Jyn did not actually fire bullets at Cassian and Kay. They were not loaded out for combat, so the gun just made a bad noise. They will argue over whether or not she actually shot them by looking at where her targeting pip was at the time of trigger down, and then do a bunch of math calculations to decide if Spy Two would have outflown the bullets or not. Yeah, see, it turns out that fighter pilots are a bunch of _nerds_ who get into in-depth physics and geometry arguments that last hours over two seconds' worth of recordings. I've literally been in shouting matches about a two-degree difference in calculations.


End file.
